In Apple’s US retail stores, it pushes ­promotional offers to shoppers as they walk past product stands. At a British cafe, visitors can receive a free magazine once they step inside.

And at TAFE SA’s newly opened ­Tonsley Park campus in Adelaide’s south, staff can manipulate the lighting and sound of each classroom from a mobile app that adapts to their location on-site.

The word iBeacon didn’t exist in the public lexicon before it appeared as an addendum to one of Apple’s anticipated announcements last June, but it has since sparked feverish development from ­engineers and companies chasing Apple’s promise of changing how we interact with physical objects with little more than a smartphone and app.

Based on the same Bluetooth technology found in almost all mobile phones globally, iBeacons – or simply “beacons" for those wary of Apple’s closed garden – allows phones to communicate with small transmitters that can determine where a person is physically and how close they are to a product or other users.

Apple’s own strategy for the technology remains unclear and its test roll-out at retail stores has been an annoyance or simply broken for some who have tried it.

However, third-party developers are beginning to build and manipulate iBeacons for their own purpose, with little to no direction from Cupertino.

“Say you just walk into the office and your computer switches on – these are really simple ways to enhance and make the stuff you do in your life more ­seamless," suggests Daniel Nolan, co-founder and engineering lead at Sydney start-up Proxima.

For the past four months, Nolan and his business partner, Sebastian Pedavoli, have been working on ways to harness iBeacons in retail stores and at major events, including the roll-out of the transmitters at 208 classrooms on TAFE SA’s Tonsley Park campus.

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The technology, Nolan says, will allow companies to easily push information or grab data from willing customers depending on their location. A beacon-fuelled venture through an art gallery could revolutionise self-guided tours, while installing the beacons on planes or in a cinema could make it easier to serve customers or find a seat.

These iBeacons also hold the promise of allowing smartphone holders to pay for physical products without a wallet or phone ever exiting their pocket – a use case Apple is reportedly working on.

“Apple is a tastemaker for this stuff," Nolan says. “Apple included this technology in its flagship mobile operating system, which has 350 million users."

Rival technology already in place

His company has enabled the technology to work on some Android phones.

But critics question whether the technology has come too late for an industry that has spent the past decade developing a rival technology – near-field communication. Now embedded in almost every new flagship smartphone running Google’s Android operating system, NFC promises many of the same opportunities offered by beacons. A user must physically tap their phone against a terminal, a move which its proponents suggest would reduce any privacy concerns.

The technology, which has undergone dozens of aborted trials in Australia alone in recent years, is now set to gain traction in 2014 as major banks and blue-chip companies adopt the technology for every­thing from payments to advertising.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg problem," says Andrew Davis of Tapit. The Sydney company has embedded NFC chips in ads for Google, Telstra, Samsung and, more recently, major beer brands Hahn and Stella Artois. “The great thing now is that everyone except the fruit phone has come on board with NFC-capable handsets."

“NFC is already there, and it’s taken 10 years to get the standards in place – all these big organisations are comfortable where the technology is," says Davis. “Beacons came out five minutes ago; it’s got to go through all of that again. It’s not going to happen overnight and by then, the innovation will have moved on."

Nolan admits the big retailers such as
Coles
and
Woolworths
are unlikely to supplant the millions already spent to roll out upgraded point of sales terminals.

“People inherently don’t trust software," he says. “That’s the big challenge – getting over the blatant distrust of humans in technology. That’s always going to be there, but as the stuff becomes more normalised, when we have more of this technology around our lives, it’s going to be interesting to see how this stuff plays out in 10 to 15 years."